There are three long strands of tradition characteristic of our approach to religion: freedom, reason and tolerance.

Individual freedom of belief. There are no creedal tests imposed upon joining one of our Unitarian Universalist societies. You do not have to avow or disavow beliefs or nonbeliefs or take a required theological, philosophical or even political position. We come together to search for truth individually within the caring and perhaps sometimes corrective context of community. We are all seekers here in need of support and mutuality. We are not islands. We cannot go it alone. We are all seekers here who have freely confessed that we do not have all of the answers to the mystery and meaning of life and death, of what came before, or what might come or happen after. We are all seekers here who give ourselves, our own selves and each other permission to change our minds. That's okay. We are seekers for whom doubt is not an enemy but an old and valued friend. Robert Weston, who served this congregation with distinction from 1960 through 1964 wrote, "Doubt is the touchstone of truth. It is an acid which eats away the false." Individual freedom of belief.

Another characteristic of our free faith is reason: the use of reason in matters theological. We believe that religion and reason are not antithetical. For us, reason and religion do not ride in separate compartments or live in different mansions, unrelated and unconnected. Reason and religion are inextricably interwoven, intermingled, interrelated, which is not to say that reason for us becomes an idol or a golden calf that we worship. Reason is not infallible. We know that each of us has the capacity to rationalize, and "the original sin of rational man," said Robert Steele, "is self-deception." Reason is not infallible. It is not an idol, but a valuable tool in the search for truth, and we as individuals and our entire race are much better for its use. The ascent of humankind to this point would not have been possible without our ability to reason. Call it a gift, if you will. Call it a natural ability. It is an important part of our character.

The third characteristic of our approach to religion is tolerance, which some have defined as, "to bear with repugnance." Well, I think we can go an extra mile and actually affirm each other as well as tolerate each other's points of view. But what I take that to mean theologically is that no one here, including myself, the minister, has the right to tell you what to believe or how to believe or in whom to believe. And the fact is that we here hold many beliefs, more than I could catalog in the brief time that I have. Some believe in God. Others do not. That's okay. Some believe in life after death. Some do not. That’s all right.

At one point in our history most Unitarians and Universalists -- I'm going way back now -- thought of themselves as Christians. But that's no longer so. That's long ago. At another point, most Unitarians and Universalists thought of themselves as theists. That held until the early decades of the last century, but that's no longer the case. And, for some decades during that last century, the 20th, the majority of us described ourselves as humanists. That, apparently, we are told, is no longer the case nationally, internationally, among Unitarians and Universalists. We are told that there is no majoritarian, theological or philosophical position or point of view within our free faith today, but that every point of view, theological, philosophical, is a minority point of view. And, that's okay with me. I like to think of it as a win-win-win-win-win, to the Nth power, situation.

If I called myself anything, if I had to label my position or beliefs, something I am still comfortable with are the terms “religious humanist” and “awestruck agnostic.” As a humanist I believe in trying to build the kingdom here, to use the traditional terminology for its own sake because it's the right thing to do, not for the purpose of earning some kind of celestial brownie points which I can cash in later on, and if I have enough stars in my heavenly crown I can gain eternity. No. One life is quite enough for me, thank you.

As George Bernard Shaw once wrote, "I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live." Once around is okay with me. As a religious humanist, with that qualifier in front of it, I admit that I am turned on by matters religious. Religious phenomena fascinate me. Spiritual quests, mine and others’, matter very much to me. To put the term “religious” before the term “humanist” for me is a way of saying that, in spite of all I know and will ever know and will ever hope to know, there is so much more that I will never know. It is to bow before the ultimate mysteries of being alive and having to die.

As far as awestruck agnostic, the Greek term for knowledge is “gnosis” (we would spell it in English). And, a gnostic is one who claims to possess esoteric saving knowledge, but if you take "A" and place it in front of the word gnosis, it negates knowledge or gnosis—agnostic. I don't know. I don’t have all the answers. It is not like my colleague and friend Ray, up the street in the church with the big brick tower, who on Thanksgiving Eve opened the Good Book and said, "Now let's see what God has to say to us." I don't have all of the answers. I don't have one book I can turn to and say, "Now let's see what we should do." And here that's okay, even for a minister. But, not having all the answers doesn't mean I am any less appreciative of the splendors of this world, the sunrises, the sunsets, relationships. I am awestruck by the majesty and power and splendor in which I exist.

Now, in sharing some of these thoughts with you, I have described in part the parameters of my faith, what I call a faith in life, not a faith in gods or a particular god, or a faith in a savior, but a faith shaped by seeking to listen, as Frederick Buechner wrote, "to listen to my life," and to pass that life through what Emerson called the "fire of thought."

"Listen to your life," wrote Buechner, in his memoir, Now and Then. "See it for the fathomless mystery that it is, in the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness. Touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it, because, in the last analysis, all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace."

That is the bottom line for me. That is a statement of faith, a profound statement of faith. And, I find Buechner's writings on faith to be some of the most meaningful I have encountered, because he always holds out another point of view to contemplate. And, in a talk he gave at the New York City Public Library in the winter of 1987, he spoke of faith as, "that which we bet our lives upon," and I had never thought of it explicitly in that way. In a sense I had, but not in that way explicitly. "Faith is that which we bet our lives upon," and he related several incidents, two of which I'll share with you briefly from his own life that have had particular meaning for him.

The first occurred a couple of months after a dear friend, an Englishman, died. When Buechner and his wife were visiting the widow in Charleston, South Carolina, and they stayed with her overnight, Buechner had a very vivid dream of his old friend, so much so that he asked in his dream, "Are you really there, Dudley?"

Dudley had been an Englishman, and when Dudley said, "Yes, Fred," Buechner asked, "Can you prove it?" Whereupon his friend plucked a strand of blue wool from a jersey he often wore and tossed it to Fred, who caught it between the index finger and his thumb.

He wrote, "And the feel of it was so palpable and so real that it woke me up." Well, when he told the dream at breakfast the next morning -- his wife and the widow were there -- his wife said, "Oh, I noticed a strand of wool this morning on the carpet when I got dressed, and I'm sure it wasn't there the night before." Well, at first, Buechner thought he was losing his mind. He retrieved that piece of wool from the carpet and has carried it with him in his wallet ever since.

Now, what do you make of that? You could make a lot of different things, and he would be the first to say that we can.

Another time he was at a bar in an airport fortifying himself for a flight, his least favorite mode of transportation, and he was sitting there. In the kind of a drink menu holder, a little wire bracket sort of thing, he noticed a piece of metal shining, and he reached for it and took it out, and it was one of those tie clips that men used to wear—perhaps they've come back into fashion, I don't know, but men used to wear them—and there were three initials engraved: CFB. They were his initials.

Now, he admits that the dream may have been just another dream, and we don't need to invoke the supernatural to account for a thread in the carpet. But he finds the tie clip harder to explain away. The mathematical odds against all three initials being there and in the correct order, he finds astronomical. But he admits, too, that could be just a coincidence.

"On the other hand," he writes, "In both cases there is another possibility. Far out or not, I don't see how any open-minded person can a priori deny it. Maybe my friend really did come to me in my dream, and the thread was a sign to me that he had."

Given his and our common sense view of the way things work, it would be far easier and less confusing to shrug off the tie clip as a crazy fluke. We are all inclined to do that, but he entertains the other possibility: "Maybe it's not a fluke," he writes. "Maybe it was a crazy little peek behind the curtain. I had been expected. I was on schedule. I was taking the right journey at the right time. I was not alone."

And, maybe, he says, all that's extraordinary about these little events is the fuss that he's made. Things like that happen every day to everybody, and maybe they mean nothing. Or, things like that are momentary glimpses into a mystery of such depth, power and beauty, that if we were to see it head on in any way other than in glimpses, I suspect we would be annihilated.

"If I had to bet my life and my children's lives," he writes, "my wife's life, on one possibility or the other, which would I bet it on?" And if you had to bet your life, which would you bet on: On yes, there is a god in the highest—or if that language is no longer viable—there is mystery and meaning in the deepest—that's an alternative—or no, whatever happens, happens, and it means whatever you choose it to mean, and that's all there is?

Of course, he continues, we can bet yes this evening and no tomorrow morning. We may know we're betting. We may not know. We may bet one way with our lips, our minds, even our hearts, and another way with our feet. But we, all of us, bet. And it's our lives themselves we're betting with, in the sense that the betting is what shapes our lives. And, of course, we can never be sure we bet right because the evidence both ways is fragmentary, fragile, ambiguous.

"A coincidence," as somebody said, "is God's way of remaining anonymous," or it can be just a coincidence. Is the dream that brings healing and hope just a product of wishful thinking, or is it a message maybe from another world? Whatever we bet, yes or no, it is equally an act of faith. Faith is less a position on than a movement toward, less a sure thing than a hunch. Faith is waiting. Faith is journeying through space and time.

"If someone, and this frequently happens, were to come up and ask me," Buechner said, "to talk about my faith, it's exactly that journey through space and time I'd have to talk about, the ups and downs of the years, the dreams, the odd moments, the intuitions. I'd have to talk about the occasional sense I have that life isn't just a series of events causing other events as haphazardly as a breakshot in pool causes billiard balls to go off in many different directions, but that life has a plot, the way a novel has a plot, that events are somehow leading somewhere."

Whatever your faith may be, he tells us, or my faith may be, it seems to me inseparable from the story of what has happened to us, and that is why I believe that no literary form is better adapted to the subject of faith than the form of fiction.

The word fiction comes from a Latin verb meaning "to shape, to fashion, to feign," That's what fiction does, and in many ways it's what faith does too. You fashion your story as you fashion your faith, out of the great hodgepodge of your life, the things that have happened to you and the things you dreamed of happening. They're the raw material of both. Then, if you're a writer like me, you try less to impose a shape on the hodgepodge than to see what shape emerges from it. You try to sense in what direction the hodgepodge of your life is moving. You listen to it.

Well, how about some other ways of listening to our lives? We may have had experiences like Buechner’s that cause us to stop in our tracks, to pause, to reflect, to consider. Or we may have to go out looking for them, taking time out. Are there symbols that emerge from our lives as having meaning for us, as being important to what stage of the journey we are on?

Symbols can be significant, you know. For years we have had this symbol of this country as a melting pot. Some have suggested in more recent years that a tossed salad would be a better symbol of our country. And religions are heavy with symbols: crosses and stars and flaming chalices. I wonder, how would we symbolize our lives? What kind of a symbol would we create for our faith or the quest that we are on? Perhaps, a mosaic or a woven fabric as suggested by the hymn that we sang earlier? And I would add that we need to listen in the margins as well as the main body, as well as the text, to those sounds we make, the songs we sing and hum, perhaps so automatically as to be almost unaware of them. What are those songs? Where did we get them? What to they mean to us? What are the titles and the themes?

And, the next time you catch yourself sighing. Do we sigh? Do we all sigh? Take account of it. Listen, listen to your life, to the sounds you make, the songs you sing, and wonder. Spend some time with your life. And, of course, there are dreams and daydreams and fantasies, ore rich with meaning there for the mining. One analyst suggested spending a half hour every day playing with a dream of the night past or a fragment of a dream, listening to our lives.

And, I would offer in closing these words from the hymn we sang earlier as a prayer of sorts for us in this endeavor, in this process of faith building and soul making, "Dear weaver of our lives' design, gently guide the sturdy threads that would survive the tangle of our days. Show us the patterns we may use to set our spirits free." May it be so.